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Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Darryl Fears reports in the Washington Post on the U.S. government's newest national assessment of climate change. It says Americans are already feeling the effects of global warming. The assessment carves the nation into sections and examines the impacts: More sea-level rise, flooding, storm surge, precipitation and heat waves in the Northeast; frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean; more drought and wildfires in the Southwest. 'Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Insurance rates are rising in some vulnerable locations, and insurance is no longer available in others. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage. In Arctic Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and autumn storms now cause more erosion, threatening many communities with relocation.' The report concludes that over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly and that increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. 'What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.'"

It looks like they are having a hard time discerning predictions and actual events. The 2013 Atlantic season had ZERO major hurricanes, and only TWO total hurricanes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2... [wikipedia.org]

Come on, this is Newscience. Predictive ability of a theory has no relevance anymore. All you have to do is keep issuing more and more dire warning and lots of press releases, backed by a consensus. In Newscience, if you repeat a mantra often enough, it becomes true.

Hurricanes impacting the US have been on the decline [wordpress.com] for decades. The warmists wanted to start naming hurricanes after congressional "deniers" in 2013. Only problem was we didn't get any. At least none worth trying to use for political demagoguery.

Always a fun fact about this particularly inane talking point. "Climate change" was a heritage foundation focus group identified term to make the phenomenon seem less scary to average americans. It got into the public lexicon from right-wing shill group "skepticism", and scientists picked it up because things like changing ocean currents would actually cool some(very regional) places, and it was deemed more accurate.

"Climate change" was a heritage foundation focus group identified term to make the phenomenon seem less scary to average americans.

Where's the evidence for this claim?

and scientists picked it up because things like changing ocean currents would actually cool some(very regional) places, and it was deemed more accurate.

Not on a scientific basis. "Anthropogenic global warming" describes both an effect and a cause of that effect. Climate change merely is a change in climate (subject to some nuance as described below) without any attribution of the phenomena or a model to which to attribute the phenomena.

Modify the first label to "anthropogenic global warming with ocean acidification" and you describe virtually all uses of the term, "climate change".

You have that backwards. Literally no possible observation is something that disproves anthropogenic climate change. Since climate is a statistical expression of average weather to disprove it you need a statistical expression of average weather that is counter to the climate change theory. That's not something any single event is capable of doing.

Don't worry, next year when there are 10 category 5 storms he'll downplay that too. Honestly though it's not climate unless you are talking decades as the smallest unit of measurement.

Insurance rates on the Gulf coast are going to go through the roof. Too bad all the people that made their money in oil will move out and leave behind all the poor to take the pain. Insurance rates in Florida are now subsidized by the state because of Hugo and a couple other major Hurricanes in the 90's, that just might be the

I live on the Gulf coast and I've been hearing that insurance rates are going to go through the roof my entire life. There's more development on the Gulf coast now than there ever was before and the vast majority of that isn't owned by all the poor people being left behind to "take the pain".

What he said. The dust bowl WAS caused by human actions. I doubt you'll look it up though to correct your own ignorance, so I'll tell you what happened. We overfarmed the shit out of the soil. Also, Deep plowing killed the grasses that were holding the topsoil in place. When combined with a drought, the topsoil just... blew away. Oops.

There was indeed a cyclical climatic phenomenon, 1936 N. American Heat Wave. The high temperatures and drought were not caused by human action. sad you instead ape the fact that poor soil management practices at the time made the dust worse but still ignore the reality of a recurring weather pattern

Nice how you put words in his mouth. He never said Dust Bowl wasn't caused by human actions. He said Dust Bowl wasn't caused by fossil fuel emissions.

Dust Bowl was caused by newly-arrived white farmers uprooting all the native prairie grasses that were drought-resistant and replacing them with cereal crops that weren't so drought resistant. It had nothing to do with carbon emissions or global warming.

We were moving from a glacial period to an inter-glacial. Yes, sea level rise was high then (it rose 75 feet). Good thing we didn't have coastal cities. So what does this mean to you. Global warming can't be caused by CO2? We don't need to worry about accelerating sea level rise? Hopefully you realize that neither of these follow.

It's extremely difficult to accept at face value a report that says every possible outcome from climate change is bad.

Especially when it comes from an administration that campaigned on the theme of change.

Several of the items they cite are not even principally related to climate change, but to population andpopulation density increases, and to past fire suppression policies. People being people, not people changing the climate.

The flood and crop damage we are experiencing are covered by federal insurance programs, but
the extra damage is caused by growing emissions. We should not be raising premiums in
response to this, but rather we should impose climate damage tariffs on imports from countries
that are increasing emissions to try to gain advantage in world markets. GATT Article XX
provides for this. http://www.wto.org/english/tra... [wto.org]
Using greenhouse gas emissions as a weapon to disadvantage our agricultural exports and damage
our manufacturing infrastructure near flood plains must be stopped.

Care to share links to some serious reviews "written by the skeptical contingent of climate scientists"? (An honest request, I'm not trying to imply there are none...).

It's pretty soon yet, since the "sky is falling" report was released just this morning(?), but I'm sure if you keep on eye on http://judithcurry.com/ [judithcurry.com] you'll find a response. She seems to enjoy blogging about her field, and isn't afraid to tell the boys when she disagrees with them.

It claims that a full 1/3rd. of the warming in the 1990's, on record, was actually due to water vapor in the air, vs. CO2 emissions and the like. Yes, it's not saying this is cause to deny the phenomenon, but it shows how we're still really in the early stages of understanding the details..... The statements of fact about exactly what's happening are largely premature.

My 2014 Mustang GT (Premium) has 425 horsepower and runs like an ape with his ass on fire. I'm grilling steaks this weekend and drinking beer on the deck in my back yard. Every night I sleep with my air conditioner set to 70 and I water my lawn daily. I'm having way too much fun to care about this subject. The climate will change and we'll adapt and even if we don't I'll be dead in a few decades and won't give a shit then either. I'm also not paying back any of that money my elected representatives borrowed from China.
Sadly none of that was meant to be sarcastic. It's all true.
That last part was sarcastic. There's nothing sad about it. Have a beer and pull up a chair on the deck. It's going to be a long drought and/or ice age. Might as well get comfortable.

Mullets are so late-70's. Today it's the "Clippers please, #2 on the sides" look that's replaced it. I get 18/25 with the Mustang and while I'm not always laying on it I don't make any effort to nurse it along either. It does do well compared to the old ones.

While I believe this report is overall truthful, I can't help but think of Clair Cameron Patterson [wikipedia.org]. It took him 20 years of fighting corporations and their "bought and payed for" scientists to convince enough people in our government that the nation was dying due to lead poisoning to actually do something about it. This despite the fact that the reality of it was in-your-face blatant the whole time. We should all consider him a hero and be thankful that he solely lead the charge against the ridicule he faced. Although a largely unsung and unknown hero, he really did save the nation. The convincing that needs done now is a bit more diverse and politically complicated. Lets hope we come to our senses in time on the issue of climate change as we did with lead.

There's this unspoken assumption by "both sides" that serious measures, i.e. a command-and-control type solution, is what the doctor has ordered.

Yet a quick look around the world, and at history, shows we will be better off adapting and chamging rather than puttng brakes on things. The average wellbeing depends on a powerful economy to provide and invent. Command and control sucks at both, in spite of the apparently rational idea it should not. It is empirical data.

There is a point where a species cannot adapt and change fast enough. We do not yet fully understand the implications of a fully realized man-made global warming event, at what point it could become a runaway event, and where that might lead. The reason the Permian extinction event "The Great Dying" killed 99% of all life on Earth, was due to the Earth rapidly flip flopping between deep freeze and hot enough to bake a loaf of bread on the surface. Evolution simply could not keep up. The halls of extinction

Interesting how such garbage passes for science these days. A counterexample to the bizarre claim that species can only adapt to climate changes of a mere 1C per million years is that a number of species have already adapted to the presence of the human automobile such as insects and spiders, weeds with seeds, and carrion eating birds. The story grudgingly mentions these counterexamples in passing as "invasive species" and "pests".

Another thing to consider is that a species can achieve an average tempera

And how would we have adopted to lead poisoning? We put the brakes on lead, CFCs, China-style air pollution (see: late 1800s/early 1900s US) and just dumping toxic shit into the environment until the land went barren and the rivers caught fire, and yet we're still here. We command and controlled those problems into submission like a bunch of commies and yet there are no bread lines.

Latest episode of Cosmos broadcast on Fox TV:"We just can't seem to stop burning up all those buried trees from way back in the carboniferous age, in the form of coal, and the remains of ancient plankton, in the form of oil and gas. If we could, we'd be home free climate wise. Instead, we're dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate the Earth hasn't seen since the great climate catastrophes of the past, the ones that led to mass extinctions. We just can't seem to break our addiction to the kinds of fuel that will bring back a climate last seen by the dinosaurs, a climate that will drown our coastal cities and wreak havoc on the environment and our ability to feed ourselves. All the while, the glorious sun pours immaculate free energy down upon us, more than we will ever need. Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?"The show:http://www.cosmosontv.com/watc... [cosmosontv.com]The news:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]

News Corp will sell anything they think they can sell. They'll sell science on Fox Broadcasting and paranoia on Fox News. The various properties don't have to get along, so long as they're profitable. Witness this jab at Fox News by The Simpsons, which also appears on Fox Broadcasting:

Is that what all the fuss is about? Best I know, the "climate-changer's" agenda is simply stuff we ought to be doing anyway, like reducing emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels. You know, things that also help with smog, health, war, pollution/land-wasting/strip-mining, and other things we all know are bad already. Climate change is just one more reason, right?

The coal and oil barons have a problem, sure, 'cause taxes and regulations for this or that reason eat into their easy money. But your

At least here in the west, the increased wildfire issues are also partially caused by lack of proper forest-management. Wildfires are a natural phenomenon that allow forests to rebuild themselves - but in our zeal to prevent them, and also to prevent forest thinning via logging over the last few decades, we are breeding wildfire territories.

As for water shortages in California - we have been court-ordered to drain reservoirs and dump extra water into our rivers in order to flood the delta so that "endangere

Streets and rivers are flooding more so it MUST be global warming. It can't have anything to do with the millions of square miles (guesstimate) of asphalt and buildings we construct each year which prevent water from entering the ground and funnel them into concrete ditches instead.

I think the President should go on a few more golf outings, you know, fly in his big old 747 to somewhere far away and play a round or two, and then fly back to DC. Then, we need to have a UN Climate Summit somewhere tropical, and figure out how to solve the logistics problems inherent in having a meeting in a remote location, like how to make sure adequate supplies of caviar are flown in fresh daily and where to park all the jets ferrying individuals to their destination.

I'll believe it's a problem when the people who are telling me it's a problem start acting like it's a problem. When the logistics problems go from caviar to videoconferencing bandwidth. When the President decides that golfing locally is a better idea than flying somewhere.

"Oh, you just don't understand international diplomacy and the need for face-to-face communications to achieve consensus!"

You're asking me to change my life and not accepting any changes in the way you live yours. Hypocrisy at its finest.

I bought my house and went crazy upside down on it. I'm in the better part of nation for climate predictions. Looks like my property value is set to skyrocket once everyone else runs out of water/food.

The Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health came out in 1964. It clearly and undeniably showed the evidence that smoking was harmful. Now, 50 years later, only about 1/2 of the states have actually banned smoking in enclosed public spaces.

Why does anyone expect America to respond to AGW any quicker or more effectively?

When the international communities remark with amazement at how recalcitrant american business, government, and even its own people are to even the suggestion of climate change I cant help but wonder if, as an american, people from other countries have a full understanding of just what it would mean for us to change...Everything we do, and all that we are, is prediacted upon cheap reliably supplied oil. this was a decision made after world war 2 and reinforced by the carter doctrine of foreign policy. it was a horrendous mistake.

We dont have local farms or slaughterhouses. everything is created in one place, and delivered by trucks that run on roads subsidized by american taxpayers from one of maybe a handful of factory farms dotted throughout the midwest. American markets have no season; if you want a jackfruit, it can and will be delivered more than two thousand miles to you and the ramifications of that is not even a cursory consideration. Drinks are kept cold, constantly. Ice is plentifully and liberally added to nearly any beverage you get. Beer hovers somewhere around the freezing mark. We can do this because the way we approach energy is just as we had in the 50's.

our rail system is no different than it was in the early 50's. slight modifications have been made to handle larger cargo, but the system runs at around 40 miles per hour and carries only the most cumbersome goods. Cars, Coal, shale oil and natural gas are the chief passengers. toxins too dangerous to transport by semi truck, things like hydrofluoric acid, are also frequently transported. Corridor rail systems used in boston and LA that do in fact transport people are powered exclusively by diesel, as are all our rail systems. We have minimal and fiercely debated electric light rail systems in some cities, and some have transitioned their busses to natural gas, however outside our largest four or five metropolitan areas every transportation request you have will be granted by the automobile.

Im not trying to justify what we do or why we do it. Its sad, and unsustainable in my opinion but whats important to understand is that acknowledging climate change and doing something productive about it in America means infrastructure overhaul not seen since Franklin Delano Rosevelt. It means the average 1 hour american car drive to work has to stop. Perpetually illuminated office buildings have to stop. Cities like phoenix will have to stop landscaping bluegrass lawns and water features into communities and we as a nation will have to swallow a nice big slice of 'we did it wrong' pie. The reasons we dont do anything about this problem are mostly political, but under the politics and the money, you have a system of society that is at its foundation based on conspicuous, questionless consumption and the planned obsolescence of nearly everything. anything to retard or stymy consumption is seen as a natural threat.

You know, I hate to be the one to point this out, but nearly every one of those things can be attributed to governmental overreach as much as it can be attributed to the environment. Just look at the water shortage statistics. States that were hit the hardest all had laws against rain water collection. Wildfires, likewise, may also be related to the insane laws we have in place. Insurance companies are being regulated to death, and are playing it as safe as they legally can. It has more to do with this insatiable need to regulate the hell out of them than it does with actual conditions. Sea levels go up and down all year long, and no amount of climate change legislation is going to have any power to control that. Of course the government is going to tell you that climate change is a big problem, and that more of your tax money is needed to combat it. They have a profit motive to do so, duh. The people to listen to here are the ones who have no political or financial agenda.

Climate is made up of weather. Any particular instance is weather. A statistical clump of pieces of weather is climate. When they say particular pieces of weather are becoming more common, they are talking about climate.

See, this is why I don't think global warming matters much after all. We're collectively incapable of preventing it because our minds just aren't made to care about long-term issues that can only be understood analytically. But by the same token, when thousands of people die and trillions of dollars are wasted unnecessarily, we also won't care about that, because it will happen over many decades, and we'll never know for sure which individual people died unnecessarily, or by what percentage our bank balances would have been larger without global warming, and anyways the TV reporting will be interesting to watch and we can fly Old Glory over the wreckage and take pictures of stuffed animals in the rubble and so forth. So, it's all good.

Funnily enough, a large amount of people seem to care..... I care. I bet that guy over there cares too. Plenty of people are taking everyday action to help, even if in small ways. So, basically, you're making excuses because that's easier than caring, let alone doing small things that aren't even that hard.

We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life. Sure there will be winners and loser, and the losers will be big oil/coal companies -- some of the most powerful institutions in the world -- and that's why nothing is being done. It is really easy to throw mud and claim there is "confusion" on whether AGW is happening. Meanwhile, they tell themselves a story about how CO2 isn't a pollutant, and doing anything would be communism, and therefore morally wrong.

AGW is easy to solve compared to the little lies we tell ourselves about what is moral, in order to protect our little empires.

...so why hasn't anyone proposed this mysterious solution if it fixed the problem that "easily", with "barely any significant change in our style of life"?

They did, it's called "reduce, reuse, recycle" and it's been around since the 70's. People have demonstrated how easy it can be, but to our collective inability to think and plan ahead, it's not commonplace.

We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life.

Because ponies. Just because you want something doesn't mean it magically becomes a good thing to get, especially for everyone else.

So far, the current efforts to restructure energy infrastructure to cause less global warming have resulted in a doubling of certain types of energy in parts of Europe. For example, petroleum prices have more or less doubled over the US prices in Europe. Similarly, residential electricity prices in Germany (note that Germany and Denmark, both with heavily subsidized, high sh

Incredibly well stated, sir. Sadly, nobody who reads proclamations of The Government as if they are gospel truth seems aware of the fact that we are currently extending the all time record interval without a category 3 hurricane making landfall in the US, that like it or not SLR is being measured at the terrifying rate of between 2.5 and 3.5 mm/year, within noise of its 140 year rate (and if anything, is currently actually decelerating, although statistically neither any observed "acceleration" nor "decele

I don't know if that's totally true. I put a non-trivial portion of my salary into a 401k every month because I've been told, repeatedly, that to be old and poor is much less fun than being old and middle class. Why wouldn't I make the same decision to act now so that my elderly years are less impacted by climate change?

As a conservative I do not believe in borrowing from future generations. We would all benefit now from running massive deficits but future generations would suffer. Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" but that is clearly not true. At some point the hammer must fall.

That's what we are doing with the climate. We all enjoy the benefits of cheap fuel while our kids are forced to bear the brunt of climate change and make the transition to new energy sources. It is not a good legacy.

Many people in the current political climate believe that any formal, organized response to climate change will hurt the economy, cost jobs, cut growth, and create additional spending. In a larger sense, and if we accept these concerns, is this not borrowing from the future?

If a business has made its money by "borrowing from the future" through unsustainable and environmentally damaging practices, and that business is subsequently put out of business because of legal reform that makes their practices impractical financially, well yes, you are hurting certain current economic concerns, but in the long run those concerns would continue to do more harm than good.

You are probably right. It seems he drew exactly the opposite conclusion from Cheney: "As a short-run strategy to reduce inflation and lower nominal interest rates, the U.S. borrowed both domestically and abroad to cover the Federal budget deficits, raising the national debt from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. This led to the U.S. moving from the world's largest international creditor to the world's largest debtor nation. Reagan described the new debt as the "greatest disappointment" of his presidency" -

The Arctic sea ice has melted much faster than anyone was predicting just a decade ago. Ice, aerosols, and cloud cover are not very well understood, when you get a bunch of experts together to agree on a statement about those things in a report like the IPCC, the statement is almost certainly going to be conservative. What has changed recently is our ability to measure the changes in the ice mass of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps to a high level of precision using the GRACE satellite. It doesn't really help scientists make better predictions but it does provide a better test, and allow them to make more confident statements about what is happening now.

A silver lining? - I heard what could be considered good news to everyone (except coal barons). Here in Oz we're busily industrialising the great barrier reef by building a controversial coal mine and the largest coal port in the world. The multi-nationals who were behind the project (BHP, Rio, some banks,..) have all walked away from the project. It's now been reported (on a local business show) that the mine will probably not have the customers in India it expects. Why? - Because wind and solar are now roughly at parity price with imported coal in India and prices are dropping at a rate such that in 2-3yrs time renewables in India will be 10% cheaper than imported Aussie coal. What's is sounding even better is that coal exports have dropped significantly in price since the project was announced and yet it is still neck-to-neck with the price of renewables in India.

If those reports are not a gross exaggeration then it looks like some developing nations really will leapfrog the west and go straight to renewables.

Like the Syrian civil war? - Sure social media assisted in the Arab spring once the uprising began but what triggered the uprising? Why did that lone protester set himself on fire in the public square? - Did all these people all suddenly wake up one day and suddenly realise "OMG, I've been living under tyranny my entire life" or could the worst drought ever in the fertile crescent (the birth place of agriculture), and the food riots it caused in major cities such a Cairo have something to do with it?

See, this is why I don't think global warming matters much after all. We're collectively incapable of preventing it because our minds just aren't made to care about long-term issues that can only be understood analytically.

It is also very, very, very difficult to do anything about it. Even if we (humans everywhere) reduced emissions to zero, global warming would continue for quite some time. And.what are the chances we could drop to zero emissions overnight, even if everyone agreed we should? Yes, we need to reduce fossil fuel use where we possibly can. It has all kinds of benefits. Just keep in mind that reversing global warming is not among those benefits. Not for some time.

I agree with what you say, but at some point we are going to need to make the transition away from fossil fuels. The impacts up front are relatively mild. Even if we start now we won't be able to avoid them, but we may avoid the worst impacts down the road.

Well, as humanity has done in the past, we should probably listen to those who know most about this topic - the scientists who work on it day in, day out, who understand the mechanisms at play far better than anyone else. But lots of people don't because they don't like what the scientists have to say, so we are screwed. Your questions are easily answered by those in the relevant field - will you listen to their answers, or ignore answers you don't find acceptable?

The really big problem is, "Okay. It's happening. Now what do we actually DO about it?"

Right there the knives start coming out. Because everyone has a different idea of what should happen.

And there are very few concrete plans, based on actual, proven science.

Most are just variations on "lets tack on a bunch of fines and taxes to make doing certain things unpopular". Which doesn't ACTUALLY address the problem.

Then you have all the people proposing stuff like carbon sequestration through iron doping of algae and all sorts of unproven schemes based on pseudoscience.

Not to mention the fact that we STILL don't have a computer simulation that ACCURATELY models the phenomenon. In short, we can't even properly quantify THE PROBLEM. How the hell are we supposed to come up with a "solution"?

On top of that, everyone in the US could stop producing greenhouse gasses RIGHT NOW, and it wouldn't do a damn thing. Because everyone else is still putting the stuff out. SPECIFICALLY China. Unless we have government buy-in representing the majority of the world's population all that's happening is that we're trading one set of bad actors for another.

And everyone's so precondition to fight over the smallest detail on this that I honestly feel that nothing will ever TRULY be done about it.

Not through lack of care for the long term. But over-abundance of inflexible actors working at cross purposes.

If us dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is causing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to increase (and hence the problem), then, well maybe we should stop doing that. This is exactly like smoking. A man hears that smoking causes lung cancer "Well, there's a problem without a solution" he thinks to himself, while sucking down a Marlboro to calm his nerves. It's not complicated - stop smoking! Admit that you excuses, "I have a moral right to smoke!" "Its a cultural thing" "I'm skeptical of the evidence" "It's too hard to quit" are just things you made up to comfort yourself in your addiction, admit you have a problem, stop smoking, and move on.

Best estimates are that had we started maybe 10 years ago it would be about 3% of GDP over a defined period to solve the problem. It's a large number and it will take some effort, but so what? Previous generations dealt with problems larger than this. We have the means available with Nuclear power, solar and wind, which will only get cheaper as newer technologies arise through investment.

The problem is, people don't want to admit there is a problem. The honest truth of the skeptical position: "There's a problem but I'd rather leave it for future generations to solve than get off my arse" sounds a bit amoral, and hence we never hear that spoken out loud. Admit you have a problem and move on.

If us dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is causing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to increase (and hence the problem)

There is no single "The Problem". And the bigger problems, such as poverty and overpopulation, have solutions that currently depend on elevated generation of greenhouse gases. We can crudely divide countries by whether they're near the bleeding edge in wealth and well being of their citizens or not and whether they care enough about global warming to make any sacrifices. It turns out the only parties willing to make sacrifices are those who are wealthy (such as the EU) or under the climate gun (such as Bang

"Most are just variations on "lets tack on a bunch of fines and taxes to make doing certain things unpopular". Which doesn't ACTUALLY address the problem."

If the problem is rampent overconsumption, british columbia proves that increasing taxes does make people use less fuel.

"A report by Sustainable Prosperity entitled BCâ(TM)s Carbon Tax Shift After Five Years:An Environmental (and Economic) Success Story suggested that the policy had been a major success. During the time the tax had been in place, fossil fuel consumption had dropped 17.4% per capita (and fallen by 18.8% relative to the rest of Canada). These reductions occurred across all the fuel types covered by the tax (not just vehicle fuel)."

Yes, I realize that everyone hates all taxes. I am not saying whether it is right or wrong, but the province of BC proves that it is effective at addressing the problem of too much carbon emissions being produced.

If you think predicting moon and solar cycles is not useful, then you should perhaps go back and look at history. As a general tip: overgeneralizations like the one the GP is debunking are always wrong (including this one? maybe!).

Which I guess is why people such as yourself, who make predictions "Nothing will change!" with extrapolating from the past are making meaningless waffle, whereas scientists who extrapolate from past data "the climate was x sensitive in the past to CO2 levels, I predict it will again in the future" are merely extrapolating a meaningful result.

So if you and your denialist friends want a seat at the table and want your ideas to be heard, then by all means, bring your extrapolations to the table, if indeed, you have any.

You can't predict anything meaningful or useful. Telling me next year will have a spring and summer isn't useful, it's a given....

The statement I was responding to was "No one can predict the future." Not "predictions of the future aren't meaningful or useful."

However, I will state that my prediction that summer will follow spring and will be warmer than winter is useful, in that it tells me that I should plant my tomatoes in spring, rather than in autumn. Predictions of the future are, in fact, very useful, and we make them all the time.

The other commenter wasn't predicting anything of consequence. On the contrary, he was simply extrapolating from the past. Those are two very different things. Extrapolating from known cyclical behavior can indeed be useful, but as a "prediction" it's pretty much a joke.

Extrapolating from the past is one way to predict the future, yes; I'm not sure why you think it

You know, climate effects weather.... That's kind of the point. One is a subset of the other.

Just because it's snowing (weather) doesn't mean the globe (climate) is getting colder. Whereas if the global climate WAS getting colder, we WOULD see weather effects. Pretty much opposite the ones that we're seeing I suppose.

According to the government's own figures, 78% of the United States has been experiencing the coldest year (i.e., 2014 so far) since 1937. About the only exception has been the SW like the LA region right now. Great Lakes have record ice for this time of year. Arctic is at normal sea ice levels and Antarctic levels are above normal. Which wouldn't be worth mentioning if it hadn't been a strong trend for well over a year. But what's really educational is to look at the actual record of past years, rather tha

Fascinating. While I can't comment on all of these points, I did a bit of searching regarding the second LINK [wordpress.com] about global sea ice: That graph shows the global sea ice area, not the volume. The area slightly increased while the volume has steadily gone down [skepticalscience.com] over the same period of time.

This is what makes it impossible for the armchair scientist to understand this. Inevitably, someone will reply telling me why my link is a bunch of dumbutts and how that graph is irrelevant, we should be looking at something else.

That first link is quite amusing, because it explains nothing in what the data actually is. His single graph, which he summarizes as "global temperature", is actually the monthly anomalies of the lower troposphere global mean, ie. by how many degrees was that month differing from the average of that month's records. It's also funny to be using a simplistic linear approximation when the data is this noisy; it means nothing.

The troposphere isn't what most people think of when they talk about temperature. If you look at the very site he uses, WoodForTrees.org, pretty much every other graph, again using the simple linear approximation at play here, shows an increase. He pretty much cherry-picked the graph that confirmed his biases. This isn't to say that the graph is wrong or that my analysis is right. It just means that, as so many people have said already, you just CAN'T summarize the whole enormous complex machine that is the climate by a single measurement. What does that graph mean in relation to everything else? I'm not a climatologist, I don't know. From what I can tell [blogspot.ca], he's not much more recognized in the topic than I am. I won't claim that credentials are all that matters, but I will trust an actual scientific organization (or even just a single researcher in the field) before a random guy using a fake name on WordPress. Again, not because I'm doing an appeal to authority, but because this whole thing is way too complicated to start doing armchair climatology.

According to the government's own figures, 78% of the United States has been experiencing the coldest year (i.e., 2014 so far) since 1937. About the only exception has been the SW like the LA region right now. Great Lakes have record ice for this time of year. Arctic is at normal sea ice levels and Antarctic levels are above normal. Which wouldn't be worth mentioning if it hadn't been a strong trend for well over a year. But what's really educational is to look at the actual record of past years, rather than just taking other peoples' word for it.

This guy [wordpress.com] is a very good source of historical comparisons to todays weather AND climate.

When you know a little actual history of our climate, you look at these "warming" scares and go "Pffffft. Baloney."

He posts some really great, actual historical stuff like THIS [wordpress.com] and THIS [wordpress.com] and THIS [wordpress.com].

Alarmists can say what they want about skeptics, but the historical record is the historical record.

Good luck trying to rebut the actual thermometers in, say, 1940 for example. They said what they said.

So the first link is the infamous trick of showing no warming by starting with 1998, the hottest year ever. Doing so obscures the fact that we've spent the last 15 years almost matching the hottest year ever!

The second link is an unsourced graph of percentage of weather stations experiencing 100F days. The implied interpretation is that 100F days are less frequent. The unaddressed question is how has the composition of weather stations changed in the last 100 years, are there more outside of urban centres,

The science was in for "peak oil" scare all the way back to 70s and the same kinds of people were calling deniers "stupid" and "cowards" and calling for urgent massive government spending on green projects and massive destructive regulation of job creating industries as a response. 45 years later and the peak oil has been exposed as a hoax, only for global warming to take its place.

Oil production has been plateauing despite more drilling in even more remote areas and deeper waters, with new methods of extraction being deployed (shale fracking - it's not just for gas y'know). We keep drilling more holes just to keep up with the diminishing returns.

The quality of the crude has declined, and it's gotten so bad in the past few years that now tar sands are economically viable because there's no place else to get it.

Or did you think "peak oil" means it would all run out in one night?=Smidge=

Peak oil is not a hoax - it's mathematical fact. It'll happen at some point as the resources of this world are not limitless. Rising cost/barrel means some sources which are not financially viable become viable (as happened with the oil sands in Alberta). Fracturing will generate a lot of production in the short term but they are not long term sources.

While we have not hit peak oil, we have hit peak oil per capita (back in 1979).

As nerds, the first thing we should check is the power requirements of our technological gadgets in our daily activities.

Print with PLA instead of ABS, use a tablet or low-end computer instead of a gaming PC to read Slashdot and watch YouTube, stream Netflix via an Apple TV instead of a PS4/Xbox One, etc. The list is endless.